Event Details - Beyond Land Acknowledgement

Beyond Land Acknowledgement and Treaty Elms

SUNDAY, September 19, 2021
When: 3:00-5:00 pm
Where: Founders Green (rain location Field House)

What: Toward Right Relationships with Native Peoples

Toward Right Relations with Native Peoples: This interactive workshop is being offered to Haverford students as we seek to understand our unique relationship with this place, we call Haverford College within the larger context of Settler Colonization in the Americas.

This is an important program in our THRIVE Initiative. Through the work of THRIVE we wish to share truths, open dialogues across difference and offer opportunities for healing. This workshop will be an extended orientation activity that we hope will deepen your knowledge and compassion.

In addition to student speakers and participants, we are fortunate to have Paula Palmer and Dennis J. Coker, the Principal Chief of the Delaware Lenni Lenape people help facilitate this workshop. We look forward to your joining us and sharing in this rich experience.

(Paula Palmer, a Quaker peace worker, and Jerilyn DeCoteau, an Ojibwe attorney and educator, founded and direct the Toward Right Relationship with Native Peoples program. They created and facilitate the Toward Right Relationship workshops, and they have trained more than 100 Native and non-Native people who also facilitate the workshops in various parts of the country.)

More about the workshop:

“We offer this 2-hour workshop in response to calls from Indigenous leaders at the United Nations and the World Council of Churches. Through an experiential exercise, we trace the historic and ongoing impacts of the Doctrine of Discovery, the 15th-century justification for European subjugation of non-Christian peoples. Our goal is to raise our level of knowledge and concern about these impacts, recognize them in ourselves and our institutions, and explore how we can begin to build relationships between Native and non-Native peoples based on truth, respect, justice, and our shared humanity.

During the workshop, the story of the colonization of the land that became the United States is told through direct quotations from Native American leaders, Euro-American leaders, and Western historians. Participants symbolically take part in the process, with time to reflect and share their responses.

“This is an incredibly powerful experience … a tool with the power to engage the hearts and minds of a community in the work of acknowledging our history in order to begin to imagine a new way forward. —Rev. Nikira Hernandez-Evans (Paiute)”

CO-SPONSORED BY:

THRIVE Initiative, Joyce Bylander;

Walter Sullivan, Quaker Affairs/Religious Life;

Orientation Co-Leaders: Ryan Totaro, Hikaru Jitsukawa;

RSL Co-Leaders: Natalie Kauffman, Taylor Seid